Warriors’ owners listening to neighbors about bayfront arena plan

The Golden State Warriors new owners are remarkably upbeat for businessmen who have paid a record $450 million for a basketball team that’s gone to the playoffs once in 19 years and are looking to sink another $500 million into a bayfront arena that may never get built.

“There’s no great reward without risk,” said Peter Guber, who called the effort with co-owner Joe Lacob “a privately financed adventure.”

Guber and Lacob were at the San Francisco City Club Tuesday to talk about their efforts to bring the Warriors back to the city from their current home in Oakland and house them in a world-class — and world-class expensive — multipurpose arena built on aging city-owned Piers 30-32.

After making a splash in May by joining Mayor Ed Lee and other local officials in announcing the planned move, both Guber and Lacob have been keeping relatively mum about the details of the plan, which tentatively calls for opening the arena in 2017.

It’s not an accident, the pair told the 75 or so people at the Financial District event sponsored by The Chronicle. They’ve been meeting with would-be neighbors along the Embarcadero and other city groups, listening to their concerns and trying to judge the level of support — and opposition — for the project.

“We haven’t heard a lot of complaints and we’re going to try and make as many people happy as possible,” said Lacob.

“We’re trying to be responsive, but that doesn’t mean we can absolutely satisfy a community as wide and diverse as San Francisco,” Guber said. “We don’t have all the answers; we don’t even have all the questions yet.”

The partners intend to rebuild the crumbling 13-acre piers and use them not only for the arena, but also for a surrounding entertainment area. If the proposal runs into insurmountable problems, the team’s Plan B for a new home might not include San Francisco.

“At the end of the day, it’s not called ‘show show,’ it’s called ‘show business,’” Guber said. “We want to create a degree of certainty that if we do this right, we’ll do well.”